Bishop 1 Sean Bishop Critical Introduction 04/21/2022 There’s a Place for Us: Creating Space for Queer Characters to do More Than Survive in Popular Fiction. I was in my thirties before I read a novel featuring queer leading characters that was not tragic or violent. The stories I read up until then typically featured a singular queer character, a couple if I was lucky, and they were rarely the focus of the story. Ancillary characters with a violent end or a tragic separation from the person they loved was the norm I had accepted from youth. When I finally read a modern, queer-written, explicit, robust story about queer people, I felt cheated out of so many years feeling like I did not belong. The novel in question: Red, White, and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston, altered the way I thought about queer literature. Even the smallest, most pedestrian instances of queerness in this romantic comedy brought me to tears in a way I had a hard time understanding. Initially, I wept for the years lost to shame and concealing my own sexuality. Then, I began to understand how much stories like this would have helped me in my formative years—and how much levity and camaraderie they might have brought me after I came out and felt isolated from the queer community. In the excerpt from my unfinished and untitled novel that follows this essay, Wyatt and Timo move through a world that I have grounded in my own experience but injected with more hope than the tradition of queer violence that precedes my writing might allow. Bishop 2 My perceptions of queer life were forged in the deep fears of White Mormon America and it took decades to let them go. I moved to Los Angeles after high school and moved to New York City after completing my graduate degree. In both places, I learned more about the human (and queer) experience than I ever had in a classroom. As I moved through my graduate degree, thinking about the kinds of stories I wanted to write, I realized that most of the stories I was ever taught in school featured straight white characters, were written by straight white authors, and taught by straight white teachers. As lucky as I felt to live in Harlem and Hollywood in my early adulthood, I also begrudged the fact that I had to leave the state of Utah to meaningfully engage with diverse communities. In her article for The Lion and the Unicorn, Boston University children’s literature professor Laura M. Jimenez rebukes the longstanding tradition of lumping diverse topics into one day of curriculum, comparing it to the ethnic aisle at a grocery store where “everything else” is shoved onto the end of one aisle and that “this method of handling diversity makes one thing clear: non-White, nonheterosexual, nonmale, nonneurotypical, nonmiddle class, nonChristian communities are lumped together not because of what we are, but rather because of what we are not. The message is clear: we are not normal” (Jimenez 107). Looking back on my education in Utah, I felt that I had received a perfectly acceptable education from a singular heteronormative white perspective but that I had missed out on anything else. Marginalized storytellers have always been writing; we just have not sufficiently presented those stories to our youth. The fear of otherness was so great that the concept of otherness was not something I began to comprehend until I physically vacated the mostly straight and White world that educated me. For a young reader in rural Utah, it was simple to imagine that the acceptance of queer stories, and therefore queer lives, in the broader public has been a linear ascending graph from Bishop 3 the first point in recorded history sloping slowly upward toward today. I was born in the peak of the AIDS crisis and my understanding of queer people began with the understanding that we are in very real danger of dying if we succumb to our urges. The borderline puritanical beliefs of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints mixed with distinctly American qualms over sex, especially queer sex, congealed in my mind as an insurmountable barrier to a happy adulthood. My frame of reference for gay characters in media came from novels like IT where a gay couple is violently killed in the same scene they are introduced, right at the beginning of the novel, to movies like Cruising featuring a straight cop infiltrating the gay scene in New York City to stop a serial killer who is dismembering gay men and leaving their bodies scattered across the Hudson. From Philadelphia to Giovanni’s Room, my idea of queer adults was that they often died early and violently—and that there was no escaping that fate. This assumption, as incorrect as it may be, is not an accidental byproduct. In my story, not only will the queer teens survive, but they will encounter queer adults who have carved out safe spaces for themselves. Wyatt and Timo will learn from adults who model a safe, comfortable, even boring adulthood that is often excluded from the queer narrative in a way that defies queer reality. As I moved out of elementary education into high school, I felt the tension against queer acceptance ease. My introduction to stories like Middlesex, Maurice, and The Color Purple helped outline a broader and more diverse queer experience that did not always end in death. This more realistic experience was also not only about white men, and not only about sex. My observation of a steady increase in tolerance for queer people from the mid-eighties to now was not altogether incorrect, but I quickly realized that public perception of queer acceptance has navigated repeated and extreme peaks and valleys over the last century. The gradual line of increased acceptance I imagined before is perhaps more accurately described as one portion of Bishop 4 one curve in an ongoing spiral, moving outward from the center. In his 2010 article for GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Brian J. Distelberg explains that “post-Stonewall commonplaces about the fragility, clandestinity, and tragedy of the earlier period were manufactured by gay activists indifferent to the ways many older gay people had drawn from the resources available to them to create social and cultural spaces in which they were quite visible to one another and from which they drew strength and support” (Distelberg 391). When viewed through an historical lens, the ebb and flow of public perceptions of queer people appears to be cyclical rather than linear. Killing queer characters in fiction, especially femme and female queer characters, has plagued the queer canon for decades, and it can be difficult to imagine a time when this phenomenon was not a common occurrence. Critics and scholars often tie the bury your gays trope to the era of decency laws in the late 19th century. In her essay for McNair Scholars Journal, Haley Hulan describes the trope as a price of admission “to allow LGBTQ+ authors to tell stories which featured characters like them without risking social backlash” (Hulan 17). It is easy to argue that the tradition of violence toward queer characters in fiction simply mirrors the violence toward queer people in life. While that may be partially true, especially in recorded Western history and therefore contemporary Western literature, violence is not the whole story. While many queer people undeniably faced violent opposition, so many more were able to adapt to the climate in which they lived and loved. The overly violent and tragic fiction on the page mirrored a fiction certain writers may have been telling themselves about previous generations. Queer writers, activists, artists, and political figures might then be equally guilty as their straight counterparts who manufactured a violent and tragic past for queer people in their works. The oppression of queer people was very real, but I wanted to know how we might write about Bishop 5 oppression accurately without leaving out the ways we overcame that oppression. There was, is, and will always be more to the queer story than its most violent scenes. Romance stories between straight characters, even those set in times of war and extreme violence, give us a great example of the ways authors can suspend disbelief to offer hope. Just like their straight counterparts, plenty of queer people evaded violence through subterfuge, isolation, double lives, and other means that make for great storytelling. The tradition for romance stories has also been especially kind to other unlikely couples who—had they actually existed in their respective historical settings—would most likely not have lived happily ever after. In her article for All About Romance, author KJ Charles uses the Regency period as an example of how we often forget that “women faced at least a 1 in 7 chance of dying because of pregnancy or labor…women found marriage so hard to come by because of the appalling slaughter of the Napoleonic wars, decimating a whole generation of men” (Charles). While Charles is primarily writing about authors like Julia Quinn–contemporary authors who set their stories in the Regency era–her point about how deeply romance readers are willing to believe in happy endings must have held even more weight with readers who lived through that period. Jane Austen’s initial readership must have been able to see enough of their lives in these stories to relate to the characters—and enough glossy fantasy to overlook the fanciful and elevated romantic notions the stories relied on. Austen’s mere existence, let alone success, resisted a patriarchy that was infinitely more tangible and violently cruel than the version we live with today. Her stories troubled the notion that marriage was a business arrangement rather than a voluntary act of love. Charles asks, “why aren’t we so quick to suspend reality for same-sex couples as we are for heterosexual illegitimate sons, courtesans, poor clergyman’s daughters, or Bishop 6 werewolves? If we can look at the past and reimagine it with brighter colors and better endings for women, why not for queer people?” (Charles). What felt unlikely, or even impossible, to me as a child felt not only possible but necessary to me as a contemporary fiction writer. I set out to write stories about young queer people who make it to adulthood, who find others like them to help navigate the world, and who get to experience romance and heartache just like anyone else. In the pages that follow, the yet unnamed novel about Wyatt and Timo is filled with themes and topics that may lead readers to believe that mine is just another installment in a long tradition of novels where gay characters are beaten up, bullied, separated, or killed. I want to upend that expectation and navigate dangerous situations without sacrificing ancillary queer characters. Where Casey McQuiston’s novel showed me the warm and thrilling opposite of the bury your gays trope, I want to navigate darker topics without falling for the trope. Instead, I wrote something that feels real and immediate and terrifying but that also illustrates the many ways queer people survive adversity. Flirting with the edges of tropes is often a necessary step in disrupting the narrative stereotypes that bury your gays relies on. Wyatt and Timo are inserting themselves into several dangerous situations, chasing after Wyatt’s supernatural visions in order to find Timo’s missing sister. As each of these instances comes and goes, my aim is to converse with what could happen and show that the worst outcome is not the only outcome. In the pages below, Wyatt’s experience centers around the confusing and terrifying episodes where he sees impossible things. He will have to keep circling back to the accident, the aftermath, and the frequency of these episodes to understand what is happening to him. In Jane Allison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode, she discusses such a narrative spiral as “a helix winding downward—into a character’s soul, or deep into the past—or it might wind upward, around and around to a future. Near repetitions, but Bishop 7 moving onward” (Allison 144). She posits that the building blocks of these spirals vary from structural narrative choices down to individual word choice. Both in motif and physical travel, Wyatt’s story will circle outward from a central point toward his goal. Wyatt’s world will expand, accompanied by a presence that appears to be caring for him and keeping him safe. As I have the privilege of creating this protective force, I will do so by navigating away from the tried and untrue position that queer people, missing girls, people without power, and people of color serve best as sacrificial motivation for their straight and male counterparts. Disrupting a trope about violence, in this case, requires a proximity to violence. In his writing guide Thrill Me, Benjamin Percy cautions writers about handling violence in a chapter called “There Will Be Blood.” He advises that rather than showing every detail about the ways a person can hurt someone, we should “revive the discussion of obscenity, the art of restraint. The concern here is not with what is moral, or right, or proper, but rather with what is effective, asking how depictions of violence best serve a story” (Percy 52). Wyatt is navigating a story where someone can walk off with a young girl who may never be seen again. The possibilities of what might happen to these kids is the true horror. Without sacrificing the reality behind these types of crimes, I started to write something that relies on our imaginations rather than gory details to convey the horror people can cause one another. The queerness of these characters is not directly tied to a higher likelihood of becoming a victim of crime. The act of being queer, the act of coming out, the act of dying at the hands of straight people are not what drives my plot. Instead, these characters happen to be queer while they navigate a world where horrible things can, and do, happen to anyone. To ground my supernatural story in truth, I set out to write about the specific aspects that shaped my somewhat pessimistic early views of queer culture. After researching the ways queer Bishop 8 writers have represented themselves in fiction in the past, I noticed a pattern of successful queer writers who told their own stories—but with strategic adjustments to the barriers they faced in their own lives. My almost exclusively white, remarkably rural, and wildly religious early life was not a place I could imagine queer love might thrive. I started to imagine that rewriting my own personal history might provide an inherently authentic and dynamic setting for a story. In a piece for QED, Qwo-Li Driskill remembers that the idea of Gay Liberation “didn’t come to small towns in the West. It certainly made it to cities in Colorado—Denver and Boulder in particular— but not into the lives of queer and trans young people in rural areas” (Driskill 48). To trouble the world I grew up in, I wanted Wyatt and Timo to have open conversations about sexuality because queerness existed as a viable option in their families and peers in a way it never was for me. After deciding on mirroring my own life when it came to the setting for this story, I studied a broad range of contemporary novels featuring queer characters to better understand how we are still burying our gays (in closets, in subtext, in taboo) even if the characters survive the action of the story. Understanding my penchant for crime stories, ghost stories, and gothic tales, I wanted my queer characters to navigate the darkest and most dangerous circumstances with a similar rate of survival and happiness as their straight counterparts. I also wanted to explore intersectionality and how it compounds oppression in life, and tropes like bury your gays in literature. The following novels each presented different ways to subject queer characters to turmoil, with varying degrees of successful redemption at the end. Bishop 9 The Vanishing Half (2020) by Brit Bennett. Jude leaves her mom in North Carolina to attend school in California, where she meets Reese, whom readers slowly realizeis a transgender man. While Bennet does an excellent job of writing Reese as a robust, complicated, integral part of the story, the book never uses the word “transgender.” The only time Reese’s gender identity is explicitly mentioned is when Barry, Reese’s guide and mentor in queer 1980s Los Angeles uses outdated language: “you’re a transsexual” (139). Bennet goes on to successfully navigate a beautiful love story between two people, one of whom happens to be trans. Jude’s innocent and instant acceptance of Reese, once she understands what his chest surgery means, is touching and affirming. Incidentally, Reese survives and is the last person mentioned on the last page of the novel. Bennett’s novel is not primarily centered on queer people, but she still creates a central queer character who survives and finds lasting love. In my own writing, I wanted to center queer characters and explicitly present their queerness early and often. While Bennett did not set out to write a story that centers queer people primarily, she provides an excellent example of writing queer characters against an unforgiving backdrop while maintaining dignified and complex character development. In my story, Wyatt’s queerness is simultaneously featured and commonplace. He was outed against his will by a classmate, but it did not interrupt his home life. “My mom already knew. We had never talked about it really, but she knew. And she’s been great” (20). Other events in his life are more meaningful to him and to this story. At the same time, his feelings for Timo and his identity are important to him. Having gone through enough self-loathing—in life and in queer literature—I felt it was important to explore a teen queer life where self acceptance is not a significant hurdle, let alone the primary obstacle. Bishop 10 Summer Sons (2020) by Lee Mandelo. The story begins after one of the central queer characters is already dead. While Mandelo introduces a varying cast of queer characters, we experience the story from Andrew’s point of view. He does not admit or understand his own feelings for his late best friend Eddie until the last quarter of the story. Andrew’s process for discovering these feelings is riddled with drug use, hyper-masculine fist fights and car racing, and academic chest-pounding. Set in the American South in the modern day, Mandelo’s overall tone and pace works well for these characters. I set out to build a similarly dark and terrifying world, without multiple scenes where gay and trans men are beaten to a pulp. Mandelo’s hyper-macho and high-octane story of young people in an isolated area presents the reality of being queer in a small town and how it can simultaneously feel dangerous and welcoming. Mandelo realistically represents the lingering prejudices of the American South, while equally realistically displaying that allies still exist in hostile spaces. In my own writing, I wanted to capture some of that tension without leaning into the cliche of a small town where beating up queer people, people of color, or otherwise minoritized people was common, even encouraged, occurrence. Of course, violence can happen in a small town—and does happen both in my writing and in Mandelo’s—but in both cases the violent acts can happen to anyone. They occur as a matter of circumstance rather than as an obligation, cliché, or trope designed to make up for the existence of queer people in the story. Wyatt and Timo will face frequent danger and occasional violence, but never at the hands of each other or someone coming after them for being queer. Even in the case of the missing girls, their abductions are inherently violent but the kidnapper will not torture or abuse them. Bishop 11 This goes back to the previous conversation about avoiding sugar-coating reality while also avoiding explicit depictions of torture, sexual assault, etc. I can tell an equally suspenseful, realistic, and terrifying story about someone exerting their power and control over vulnerable people without writing plot points around the worst things people do to one another. The Rules of Magic (2017) by Alice Hoffman. Hoffman’s sequel demonstrated quite a few traps I hoped to avoid. The singular queer character, Vincent, is part of a family of witches who cannot fall in love—or their loved one will meet an untimely death. Vincent is also gifted (or cursed) with a magical irresistibility that causes most people to become obsessed with him. Throughout the first half of the story, Vincent is propositioned by several women even though he is not yet an adult. Something about the way Hoffman chooses to sexualize such a young person, place him in a sexual relationship with a much older neighbor, and then suddenly pivot to him falling in love with a man felt unrealistic to the point of fetishization. Vincent’s queerness is presented as a byproduct of his over-sexed personality and the ability to manipulate people rather than a genuine extension of how he wants to live. This is all written without acknowledging that Vincent, a child, was abused by this older neighbor. The narrative, whether Hoffman intended it or not, frames Vincent’s sexuality as a fantasy and his queerness as an afterthought. I chose to write teen characters surrounded by all kinds of flawed adults, but none who would use their influence to take advantage of them. Ironically, the rest of the novel serves as a successful queer allegory in that the family is in constant fear of violent consequences for loving who they choose. Each of the Owens kids loses someone along the way and they all lose their parents, just because they all fall in love with people anyway. In these scenes, the novel is much more successfully in conversation with the Bishop 12 queer experience than in the more stereotypical and trope-informed moments with Vincent. In his final scene, he intentionally ingests wolfsbane to complete suicide. He has just lost his partner William, after years together. He chooses to die in a park on Samhain, holding “a photograph of William in his pocket…they had been standing on the dock in San Francisco and had persuaded a stranger to snap them together” (298). These moments that rely on stereotypical gay male relationships make the book feel as though it was published much earlier. The dated need to isolate queerness to certain areas of certain cities is exactly the sort of thing I intentionally avoided in my own story. I wanted to show that queer people exist in every corner of the world and deserve dignity and safety wherever they choose to be. The Dead and the Dark (2021) by Courtney Gould. One aspect of Courtney Gould’s ghostly tale that inspired me was the presence of successful queer adults in a story about queer youth. Logan is an eighteen-year-old woman who follows her two dads to a small town in Oregon while they scout locations for their paranormal investigation television series. Logan identifies as queer early on, joking that “her family was going to increase the queer population by 300 percent” (9) when they drive into town for the first time. Her last name is a hyphenated combination of her two fathers’ surnames, and much of her conflict in town revolves around her dads’ history in the small town. Setting the story in the town where both men grew up, met, fell in love, and experienced an unknown supernatural terror presents an interesting commentary on the intergenerational issues that arise when multiple generations of one family are openly queer. Studying the ways queer families interact through multiple generations is a frontier I had not considered previously. Now, it feels essential to illustrate how powerful an intergenerational celebration of living Bishop 13 authentically can be for queer youth. While my story does not feature a direct familial inheritance of celebrated queerness, Wyatt will meet more than one adult who paved the way for his success. Throughout these novels, I found a myriad of tactics to solve the problems bury your gays presents to writers. I also learned more about the ways we are still burying ourselves in the trappings of the past. Breaking new ground in queer fiction allows subsequent generations not only to see themselves in media, but to see themselves thriving in media. A promise of a future at all, let alone a happy future, is a gift that has previously been kept from us. Tyler Bradway, in an essay for Mosaic, describes positive queer representation as “hope for a future where queer happiness can no longer be simplistically opposed to normality” (Bradway 198). Queer happiness is already normal, we simply need more writers to accurately share it. Bishop 14 Works Cited Alison, Jane. Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative. New York, Catapult, 2019. Bennett, Britt. The Vanishing Half. New York, Riverhead Books, 2020. Bradway, Tyler. “Queer Exuberance: The Politics of Affect in Jeanette Winterson’s Visceral Fiction.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 48, no. 1, 2015, pp. 183– 200. Cruising. Directed by William Friedkin, performances by Al Pacino, Paul Sorvino, and Karen Allen, United Artists, 1980. Charles, KJ. “The Past Is a Miserable Country: Queer Historical Romance.” All About Romance, 23 June 2017, https://allaboutromance.com/the-past-is-a-miserable-country-queer-historical- romance/. Distelberg, Brian J. “Mainstream Fiction, Gay Reviewers, and Gay Male Cultural Politics in the 1970s.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 16 no. 3, 2010, p. 389-427. Driskill, Qwo-Li. “All Power to the People: A Gay Liberation Triptych.” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, vol. 6 no. 2, 2019, p. 44-53. Gould, Courtney. The Dead and the Dark. New York, Wednesday Books, 2021. Hoffman, Alice. The Rules of Magic. New York, Simon & Schuster, 2017. Bishop 15 Hulan, Haley (2017) “Bury Your Gays: History, Usage, and Context,” McNair Scholars Journal, Vol. 21: Iss. 1, Article 6. https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/mcnair/vol21/iss1/6 Jiménez, Laura M. “My Gay Agenda: Embodying Intersectionality in Children’s Literature Scholarship.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 41 no. 1, 2017, p. 104-112. King, Stephen. IT. New York, Viking, 1986. Mandelo, Lee. Summer Sons. New York, Macmillan, 2021. McQuiston, Casey. Red, White, & Royal Blue. New York, Macmillan, 2019. Percy, Benjamin. Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction. Minnesota, Graywolf Press, 2016. Bishop 1 Sean Bishop Thesis Project – Creative Excerpt 04/21/2022 Some Background: Wyatt Ross has been seeing strange and impossible things since his brother died in the truck next to him. Not all the time, but increasingly often. When he has his episodes, he feels drugged. He hears, sees, and feels in fits and starts. He is currently in his Junior year of high school, and just about to turn seventeen. On Halloween night, a ten-year-old girl named Layla, who lives across the street, got separated from her family while trick-or-treating. Nobody has seen her since. Weeks later, Wyatt’s best friend and lifelong crush Timothy, or Timo (pronounced TEE-MO, a nickname only Wyatt is allowed to use), called him in a panic because Timo’s little sister Nikki was missing, too. It’s Spring now, and Wyatt has had the same dream two nights in a row: someone in the attic, where his first episode occurred, wants to talk to him. Chapter 9 Wyatt reached up and pulled the smooth wooden bead at the end of the knotted cord hanging from the ceiling, stepping back to let the dusty ladder clack its way to the floor in front of him. His heart was plucked against his chest like he was about to go onstage to sing for a sold-out crowd. Even with nobody else around, he felt embarrassed he was entertaining the idea that he might somehow get a better signal in the attic. He Bishop 2 stared up the ladder into the dark void above him, fighting the urge to submit to how insane this would sound to anyone else. He should go back to his room, go back to sleep, and pretend none of this had ever happened. Maybe while he slept, someone would find Nikki and Layla at a gas station somewhere, having run away from home. Then he remembered the flashes of intense pain and images from a familiar place he couldn’t put his finger on. Something about that dream, or vision, or whatever it was, felt real. It felt like he had been there. The dream had been exactly the same for three nights now. He began in the attic, hearing someone call out to him. Then, he was suddenly in the cave. The details of that dusty floor, the chains and the dim amber lights bolted into the walls, the smell of rock and water and dust, the blonde hair falling in front of his downturned face, all of that got sharper and more detailed the longer he was awake. He could never explain it to anyone, but he hadn’t just dreamed about that cave. He was inside the cave. Somehow, he knew it was Layla. She was still alive, but she was not safe. As he stared out at the hazy orange sky through the rungs of the old wooden ladder and the hallway window, he knew he had seen where Layla was being held captive just as surely as he knew the sun would fall behind the smaller mountains to the West, dousing the valley from gold, to purple, to black. He took a deep breath and practically ran up the ladder, scrambling over the lip of the entrance and charging toward the window in the small front gable. He leaned down in the windowsill to stare out at the street. The Iversons’s house was covered in signs, balloons, stuffed animals, and votive candles that all looked damp and even more tragic in the cold morning light. Wyatt thought about Timo’s house, just two streets Bishop 3 over, and how the media onslaught was coming their way now that Nikki was missing, too. He bit his lip painfully as he remembered Timo saying that nobody from our street had come to help look for her that night. Nobody but Wyatt and Katy. The difference between a blonde, white girl going missing on Emerald Place and a brown girl disappearing from Plymouth Street was loud and disgusting. Nobody was accusing the Iversons of negligence. Nobody whispered about the “dangerous neighborhood” Layla went missing from, even though the two homes were within a half mile of each other. Wyatt’s stomach gave another turn and he realized that he wasn’t only grossed out by how awful some of his neighbors were. The air felt thick, and his head was swimming. He instinctively crouched and placed one hand behind him, lying flat on his back before he fell. His heart raced as he realized it was happening. He was going under again. Just before his eyes rolled back, he thought he saw someone standing in the corner, shaded by the sharp slant in the roof of the front gable. Tendrils of blonde hair swaying…head tilted forward…a floor of hard, cracked clay. Movement, but not his. The girl drew breath…small lungs…tired lungs and a wavering, slow heartbeat. A metallic tang on the back of an impossibly dry tongue. Eyes moved and Wyatt followed. No control. A passenger. A hitchhiker in the mind of a kid clinging to life…tried to move his head. Nothing. Dirt gave way to rippling rock in decorative formations. Stalagmites in sporadic bursts. Tilting. Focus moving too far, then too close, then blackness and breath. “Look around…slowly…” Wyatt thought Bishop 4 intently. A jump…a quiver…startled. The girl’s breath quickened. Eyes up and to the right. A narrow passageway punctuated with aged utility lights in dark metal cages. Breath even faster. Her captor? Was someone coming? Back to the dirt…focus drifting…”Do you know where you are?”…another test. She flinched again. If he could see…could she hear? “No…” Layla’s answer felt resonant…as if from inside…a strained, dry, and impossibly small voice, then tears. Head bobbing…eyes closed…shaking, then a gasp. Head up…eyes lolling. Purple and yellow blooms…spots in her vision…trailing behind the path of her focus. Tired. Foggy. Falling asleep? Dying? No food…no water…how many days? “It’s going to be okay…” Wyatt forced another thought through the fog. Another flinch. “Is there anything you remember? A street sign? A name? Anything?” a flinch for every word. Like a harsh whisper in a dark room. Vision fluttering. “Stay with me. Stay awake, Layla…” Wyatt guessed, but could feel he was right. Stronger heartbeat…resolve at the sound of a name…something in her hand. A pen? A syringe. Jagged on one end. Drugged…how many times…a flashing image…a memory… a boot on a syringe, breaking and pressing into the endless clay. Hope. Palpable. Stronger heartbeat, weaker vision, losing signal… “anything at all…” hands moved. Scraping in the clay with the Bishop 5 ruined edge of the syringe. Lines. Two lines. A clumsy squiggle…another…a number. Five digits…11478. Vision blurring steadily. A flash of gold…hands bound…darkness loud banging a metallic squeal, the beam of a flashlight heart quickening in fear…coming back. A stabbing pain in the right leg. Black latex thumb and forefinger. Another syringe…stay awake… And then nothing. Wyatt worked to open his eyes. Waves of darkness congealed to form the ceiling of the attic. As he turned his head to the left, he realized there was pressure on his shoulder and a shadow hanging above and beside him. A face. He jumped and tried to back away, but only managed to scrape his back against the dusty floorboards. A low sound thrummed in his ears as the pressure on his shoulder clarified. He realized he could also feel something on his face. “Hey.” the thrum was a voice, “Wyatt, it’s okay, it’s me, it’s Timo. It’s okay. Can you hear me?” As Wyatt’s eyes focused on Timo’s face, he was simultaneously thrilled and horrified that Timo was not a ghost in the attic. He was really there. Wyatt’s ears clicked and his eyes watered as everything came into focus. He didn’t want to think about how embarrassing he must look during an episode. Every possibility of bodily function and Bishop 6 horrible noise he might make in that state flooded through his head as Timo frowned down at him. “Wyatt? Say something, anything, or I’m calling an ambulance.” Timo’s voice was dark and urgent, his face strained. “No I’m okay,” Wyatt breathed, “I’m okay, I’m here…” “Are you sure?” Timo asked, relief washing over his face. Wyatt nodded, “Yeah, I’m good,” he stood quickly, and started to fall back again. Timo’s arm flew around Wyatt’s waist, holding him up. “Careful, take it easy,” Timo said, “Just stay right here.” Wyatt felt Timo’s hand on his back and warmth radiated from the spot. Wyatt blinked over and over, finding his feet. “Just take a second and breathe,” Timo said quietly and calmly. The smell of his black denim jacket and his favorite vanilla lip balm shined out against the dank, dusty smell of the attic around them. “What were you even doing up here?” Timo asked quietly. “Wait, how did you get in? Why are you—” Timo held up a fake looking rock. The hidden key. He remembered where it was, under the fountain on the side of the house. “Your turn,” he almost smiled. He was still worried, “Why were you up here?” Wyatt’s thoughts snapped into focus. Layla. Alive. In a cave. His heart was racing as he replayed the vision. It was so clear this time, and from her perspective. Not a foggy Bishop 7 person in the corner of an attic, but a full on immersion into someone else’s consciousness. But how? “Hey,” Timo’s warm hands crushed Wyatt’s shoulders, shaking him gently, “Are you good? Is it happening again?” “No,” Wyatt shook his head, “No I…Timo I saw something this time. It was so real, I…I think it was Layla.” Timo shot up to his full height, his eyes wide with shock, “Wyatt, what…?” “I know, it sounds insane, but…” a huge and hot tear started to fall from his left eye, then his right, his breath quickening again, “I think she’s alive. I saw her, I mean…I saw what she was seeing and I could feel…she’s so scared…what if she doesn’t have much time lef—” “Hey, hey, it’s okay,” Timo pulled Wyatt into a tight hug. Wyatt choked back sobs as Timo’s hands moved up and down along his back, comforting him. Wyatt buried his nose in the collar of Timo’s jacket, his damp cheek pressed against the warm and obnoxiously smooth skin of Timo's neck, “Slow down. Take a breath.” Wyatt did as he was told and took a long breath. Timo seemed so much taller than he remembered. It had been years since he’d been in the house, even longer since they’d done anything that resembled a hug. After a few breaths, Wyatt stood up. Timo cracked half a smile. Wyatt noticed that Timo’s jaw seemed bigger and sharper. They were growing up. It looked really good on Timo. Bishop 8 “Good job,” Timo said, “Now,” he held Wyatt out at arm’s length, slowly, “Let’s get you out of this attic and you can tell me everything.” Timo helped Wyatt down the ladder and sent it flying back up into the ceiling of the hallway. They made their way downstairs and back to the kitchen where Timo immediately started brewing tea. His hands opened drawers and cabinets automatically, remembering where everything was like he’d just done this yesterday. Wyatt sat at the long kitchen island, leaning his head on one hand. He watched Timo click the lever at the bottom of the electric kettle and blue light shone up into the glass pot. Wyatt remembered that Timo was solely responsible for his mom’s big switch from coffee to green tea. “Too much coffee can stress you out, Alice,” he had said, “let me make you my tea and if you hate it, I won’t bug you about it again.” She’d loved it. He made magical tea. After that day, he brought over a giant box of loose-leaf green tea, a very special kind of honey, and anything else she might need to make his magic tea for a year. It worked. She slept better. She seemed a lot calmer. Even after Sawyer, she never went back to coffee. “Earth to Wyatt…” Timo was leaning on the island, staring at him. He’d pulled up a stool around the corner from Wyatt. Two steaming mugs of tea sat between them. “Sorry,” Wyatt inhaled sharply, like he’d been asleep, “What did you say?” “Layla,” Timo said grimly before taking a sip, “What do you mean you saw her?” Bishop 9 Wyatt paused, took a sip, and then launched into the details of what he saw. From the dream during his nap to the shadowy figure in the attic, to the lights bolted into the walls of the cave. After a long pause, Timo nodded again, sipping the last of his tea. Wyatt caught his eye and wondered how ludicrous he had sounded for the last few minutes. “Did it look familiar?” Timo squinted, “I mean, is she close by?” Wyatt shrugged, but nodded, “I don’t know for sure, but yes. I feel like I’ve seen that cave before. Or at least…other parts of the same cave.” His eyebrows knitted together, “You have a spelunking career I don’t know about?” Wyatt smiled, relieved that Timo wasn’t angry. Or at least he wasn’t showing it. “But seriously,” Timo stood up and poured more hot water into both their mugs, followed by a fresh bag of tea, “How many caves have you been in? Should be pretty easy to figure it out if you had been there.” Wyatt was surprised by a sudden swell of emotion. Timo had just accepted it and skipped right to asking clarifying questions? Wyatt wiped his eye and tried to play it off, but Timo didn’t miss a beat. “What’s wrong, Wy?” Wyatt felt a hand on his forearm again. He shook his head in response, “No, nothing. I—you don’t think I’m insane? You just believe me?” Bishop 10 Timo paused and sipped his tea, his hand still on Wyatt’s arm. He set the mug down and sighed slowly, “Listen, Wy, everything is insane right now. I never thought for a second that something like this could happen here at all, let alone twice. I never thought Sawyer would…” Timo paused. Wyatt saw his eyes flick up, checking in, “I never thought Nikki...” this time Timo closed his eyes for a beat. Wyatt could tell he was combatting tears, too. The kind that were just below the surface, always, since Nikki went missing. “I believe you,” Timo said with finality, “You’re my best friend. I can tell that you believe it. I know it’s real for you. So either you have an undiagnosed tumor, or the accident broke your brain, or something,” Timo smiled as Wyatt tried not to spray tea everywhere, laughing. Timo waited until Wyatt had safely swallowed, “Or, you saw something real. And if there’s even a one-percent chance that was real, don’t we have to try to figure out where she is? If she’s alive…” Timo let the end of the statement hang in the air. Wyatt nodded, knowing Timo didn’t dare to even say it out loud. If Layla was alive, Nikki could be too. “Okay, but for real, when would you have gone to a cave?” “I don’t know,” Wyatt bit his lip. He closed his eyes for a second, thinking about it. He could smell the cave: dusty and wet. It was cold in the cave, but hot outside. Almost summer break. He remembered his hands getting clammy as he held his friend Crystal’s hand through the cave. Miss Judd made them promise to buddy up and not leave the group. They had to hold hands and not touch anything but the railings as they walked through the guided cave tour. He thought of Miss Judd’s round and kind face. Bishop 11 He could picture every detail of her room at Trinity North Elementary. The maroon and gray carpet tiles, the charts of times tables, letters, months of the year, planets in the solar system, and all sorts of brightly colored cartoon study guides plastered all around her walls. It was fourth grade. He was remembering his fourth-grade classroom, back in Trinity. They’d taken a field trip out to a gigantic cave just over the Nevada border. They’d ridden the bus for what felt like forever but was probably a little over two hours. They ate cold ham and cheese sandwiches wrapped in plastic wrap, a tiny package of trail mix, and a snack size bag of potato chips on the way out there. He could picture a surprising amount about the drive, but every time he reached for the name, he couldn’t think of what it was called. “Wait,” Wyatt said suddenly, not sure how long he’d been silent, “Can you hand me that?” he pointed to his laptop on the other end of the island. Timo leaned over and picked it up, setting it carefully into Wyatt’s hands. His fingers moved before he knew what he was typing. Cave Tours, West Desert Utah. Thinking of the region around Trinity which was generally called the west desert. The results popped up quickly: “Timpanogos Cave National Monument National Park. American Fork, UT.” “No…” Wyatt mumbled. Timo moved to stand behind and to the side of Wyatt, who was again knocked back by the familiar smell of him. American Fork was nowhere near Trinity and absolutely not in the West Desert. He scrolled to the next result. Bishop 12 “Danger Cave State Park Heritage Area Park. Wendover, UT.” Better. This was really far West, on the Nevada border, but way too far North to have got there and back with a bus full of fourth graders. “Crystal Ball Cave Tourist attraction Garrison, UT.” His heart rate picked up. Was this it? Garrison was close to Trinity. He clicked the Directions button and typed in Trinity, UT as the start point. One hour and twenty-four minutes to drive from Trinity to Garrison. He knew he was close. He clicked on “images” and scrolled through the results. The photos didn’t look quite right. All of the deposits in this cave were sparkling and globular. “The name makes sense, then,” he muttered as he clicked back to the website for Crystal Ball Cave. He clicked the link for “tours” and saw a rotating ribbon of images scrolling automatically below. Again, they didn’t look like what he remembered. He was grateful that Timo only stood, watching him figure it out. Wyatt scrolled further and saw a heading for “More Things To Do.” There was an image on a series of tiles that said things like “Stargazing” or “Hiking.” Those didn’t look helpful. He realized there were more tiles that moved in a ribbon, similar to the images above. An arrow popped up when he hovered over the tile on the far right, and he could cycle through more things to do in the absolutely barren west desert. Eat and Drink. He chuckled, remembering all three restaurants in Trinity, let alone how few there were out in the sticks. Biking was next. He clicked through three more, then landed on the last tile: More Cave Tours. Bishop 13 He clicked on the tile and a new page popped up. The header photo was a giant landscape of slim, dangerous looking stalactites in the exact shade of milky amber as he remembered…and as he had just seen through Layla’s eyes. “Lemuel Caves. Cave in White Pine County, Nevada. 4.8 Stars. 237 Reviews. Ranger-led guided tours of 2 historic caves covering their history, geology & ecology.” “Wait a minute,” Wyatt said, his heart accelerating. He clicked through images of the gigantic cave system, amazed at how many miles it covered. It was incredibly beautiful and absolutely overwhelming thinking of tiny little Layla Iverson being held in there by some monster. Even if she got free, she was most likely drugged, confused, terrified, starving, and dehydrated. Even adults with experience, supplies, and a clear head could get lost in there so easily. Tears came to his eyes when he remembered just how small he and his classmates felt in that cave at about the same age. It’s easy to forget just how tiny ten-year-olds are. Tears flowed freely when he remembered that Nikki’s birthday wasn’t until May. She was still nine. He clicked and clicked, looking for the chamber he’d seen from the attic. Men in goofy green uniforms pointed flashlights at the ceiling, smiling back at their tour groups. Subtle and tiny lights along the floor and hidden in the ceiling illuminated the unique and stunning features of chamber after chamber. “What’s wrong?” Timo said without moving, “Is this not it?” Bishop 14 “No,” Wyatt sighed, “Sorry, yes this is it. I think. It’s just…huge. Look at it. How could anyone find anything?” Wyatt scrolled through the photos on one side of the screen while the map of the giant cave stayed stationary in one corner. There were photos of the original cave entrance, now covered in a big steel cage. The posts on each of the four corners were enormous and rusting like his mom’s garden boxes in the backyard. He saw user-submitted photos of smiling families touring the facility. As he clicked through, he was less and less sure that this was the right place. His mind was racing back and forth between what he knew was real and what could easily be nothing but neural misfires from an undiagnosed brain tumor. He knew Layla and Nikki were missing and that people were still trying to find them. The episodes were consistent. They happened when he was around death. They started soon after he watched Sawyer die, unable to move or help. At the same time, Wyatt narrowly avoided a traumatic brain injury himself. He was severely concussed, and Wyatt overheard his mom repeating the neurologist’s words to her friends on the phone several times: “Wyatt is so lucky he doesn’t have permanent damage.” But was that true? Maybe the doctors all missed something. Was this just his confused brain sending mixed memories to him? Maybe there was a wicked strain of toxic mold in the attic and that’s why he passed out every time he went up there. But then, why did nobody else feel sick up there? As his mind raced, he kept clicking through photos. Suddenly, his whole body stopped. His eyes trained on a tiny aspect of one photo. A ranger was leaning against a rail and gesturing off into the distance. He was leaning over an older kid, pointing to something in the ceiling. The photo looked like it Bishop 15 was taken by a parent. Behind the ranger’s hat, Wyatt saw a heavy steel door with a sign that read: “Rangers Only. Keep Out For Your Own Safety.” Next to that door, a dim and rusty light lit up the alcove to the staff entrance. The light fixture was small, black, with a round cage-like housing around the incandescent bulb. It was exactly like the dim lights he’d seen when Layla looked around. “Timo this is it,” Wyatt felt like his blood was too cold. He could barely move. “The lights…” he pointed to the screen, “I saw those lights. They’re exactly the same.” “Was it the same room?” Timo leaned closer, his face next to Wyatt’s, discarding his mug behind the laptop. “No,” Wyatt shook his head, “It was a smaller room, or chamber, or whatever. And the dirt floor, remember? Most of the path is harder, concrete or just the hard stone floor of the bigger chambers.” Timo nodded, watching Wyatt slowly click from one photo to the next. “Didn’t you say you heard a door? Or a bang?” Wyatt pointed back up to the photo of the ranger and the Keep Out sign, “If it were me…if this person doesn’t want Layla to be found, they must have a way to get to areas tourists can’t.” Of course, she wouldn’t be directly on the tour routes. She could even be in an abandoned, off-limits, forgotten portion of the cave nobody else had seen in years. The cave system was vast. Even if they made it to the cave, how long would it take two teenagers to search the entire system? Had anyone ever searched it all? The prospect of searching dark and uncharted tunnels to find Layla and Nikki made Wyatt’s throat Bishop 16 clench in a dry knot. He watched Timo’s eyes flit back and forth on the laptop in front of them. Wyatt silently willed Timo to huff, roll his eyes, say it was crazy. Before Wyatt could hope for that reaction, he watched Timo’s head nod and his perfect jaw set into the exact position it always did when his mind was made up. “I mean,” Timo squinted slightly. Wyatt wrestled with the inevitable thrill of Timo’s eyes locking onto his own, trying not to physically register that he might turn inside out. Timo, with his frustratingly long and thick eyelashes and his stupid, perfect face, put his hand on Wyatt’s shoulder, “all we can do is try,right?” Chapter 10 An hour later, Timo merged Wyatt’s truck onto the interstate, heading south. Sawyer’s truck. The truck Sawyer died in. Wyatt was sitting exactly where Sawyer spent his last living moments. He stared at Timo’s smooth hands on the steering wheel, remembering the splotch of dark red where his own temple had collided with it in the crash. For some reason, Wyatt’s seatbelt kept him from continuing forward and through the windshield and Sawyer’s seatbelt failed. He died almost instantly, or so Wyatt was told. He didn’t wake up until days later. Wyatt felt a pressure on his knee and jumped. Timo’s hand shot back to the steering wheel, but his head kept turning to look at Wyatt. “Sorry, did you say something?” Wyatt shook his head, coming back to now. Bishop 17 “I just asked if you were okay,” Timo said quietly over the soft and crunchy guitar ambling from the only FM station the truck ever picked up. “I know this is, well, I think this is the first time you’ve been in the truck since…” he let the question evaporate as they passed under a bridge that separated Weber and Davis counties. “Yeah,” Wyatt nodded and shrugged, then wondered why he always tried to pretend it was no big deal. The truck had sat on the back of the driveway for almost a year. His mom’s friend and mechanic Shane fixed the windshield, bumper, and grill at his shop, had the truck detailed, and brought it back a month after the accident. The next day, Wyatt threw an ancient blue tarp over it, unable to look at the shiny refurbished truck his brother had obsessed over. Alice drove it once a month, when she picked up crates of produce for a local charity. She needed the big deep bed to make the trip, and she insisted that we had to keep driving the truck occasionally or it would never start again. Other than those short trips, the tarp stayed there until an hour ago. Timo’s hand fell back to Wyatt’s knee in silent support, his eyes never leaving the road. Wyatt reached over and turned the radio down after the static took over completely. They were hugging the mountains now. Towering purple crags with snow caps caught the last light of day, shining over the Great Salt Lake off in the distance to the west. The air was still wet with the flash of rain that hit just before they left Timo’s house. It was the first rain of the season, giving way from the weeks of snow leading up to now. Wyatt tried not to think about how cold that cave might be, or how futile this road trip probably was. Bishop 18 “So,” Timo scratched his temple, putting his hand back on the wheel. “Other than the obvious…how’s everything been? Your mom still bugging you to apply for schools?” “Yeah,” Wyatt smiled, grateful for the change in subject, “I keep telling her I’m still a junior. I’ll apply when I’m ready. I still have no idea what I want to do. What about you?” As soon as he asked it, Wyatt felt a hot flutter from his forehead to his knees. He and Timo’s friendship took a hit when Timo’s parents demanded that he go on an LDS mission. The church had recently changed the rules so boys could go a year earlier, when they turned eighteen. Right as this past summer died, Timo announced to Wyatt that he was going to graduate a year from that December, one semester ahead of schedule, so he could start working to save for his mission. His parents didn’t make a lot of money, and the church charged families to pay for rent, food, and other expenses. The fact that Timo would rush graduation and start working to pay for something was not a surprise. The fact that Timo was giving into his parents and planning on going on his mission was a blow that Wyatt wasn’t ready for. Wyatt had seen and heard of countless older cousins and friends who come back from a mission as different people. If Timo left, he wouldn’t just be gone for the required two years; Wyatt was afraid the Timo he knew would be gone forever. Ever since that time, there had been an unspoken rift between them that Wyatt was too scared to engage with. It was so much easier to pretend it wasn’t happening. “I am just as clueless as you are,” Timo’s eyes darted over, the flash of a smirk on his lips. “Every day, I think of another option. Most of them sound pretty ass.” Bishop 19 “Like what?” Wyatt pressed, still nervous to get into it but desperate to hear what Timo really wanted. “College somewhere warm sounds incredible. It also sounds impossible. Mom and Dad probably wouldn’t fork over a cent if I don’t go, you know, serve the Lord first.” Wyatt smiled, “How’s all that going?” Timo squinted, a flush came to his cheeks and his eyebrows wavered, “I mean, the same. We haven’t talked about it recently, especially since Nikki.” “Of course,” Wyatt shook his head, “Not important by comparison.” “Not at all,” Timo’s voice rose to his normal exuberant timbre. The sound was comforting. Wyatt forgot how easy he was to talk to. “I keep hoping that—” Timo stopped. Wyatt’s eyes went to the road, expecting trouble. “Timo, what? What’s wrong?” Timo sniffed and Wyatt realized he had stopped talking because he was afraid to choke up. “Sorry,” he wiped his eye with the cuff of his denim jacket. “No, don’t apologize,” Wyatt yanked open the glove box. A small pack of tissues fell out along with a cassette tape that looked like it had a tail. A small Bluetooth adapter glinted at the end of the cord. Wyatt fussed with the plastic packaging around the small brick of tissues, looking for the opening. Bishop 20 Timo sniffed, “I’m fine Wy, we’re good,” he said, just as Wyatt got the package open and pulled a tissue out. Timo smiled and set it on his knee, “Anyway, I was just saying I keep thinking that if we get Nikki home safely,” his voice caught again, but he powered through, “that maybe they’ll realize there’s more to life than forcing us to do what they did. I mean, they chose to join the church. Why don’t I get to make that choice too?” Wyatt nodded, glad that Timo was at least questioning it, even if his parents lost their minds about it. He knew gaydar wasn’t a real thing, and was a pretty problematic thing to pretend to have, but he also knew his best friend. Wyatt knew that, even on the off chance that he was wrong and that Timo was straight, he could never fit into that little box. “Want to know a secret?” Wyatt said quietly, smiling. Timo glanced over deviously, half rolling his eyes, “I know, I know. I do get to choose. Easy for you to say,” Timo slapped Wyatt’s chest playfully, “ Your parents were about that apostate life by the time we hit fifth grade.” “That’s fair,” Wyatt nodded. “Speaking of having non-religious parents,” Timo looked back at the road, “How have they been with the whole coming out thing? Well, I guess, the being outed thing?” Wyatt’s throat caught and stared ahead at the road. They had only talked about it over text messages a couple of times, and it all got overshadowed by Sawyer. Bishop 21 Wyatt sighed, “My mom already knew. We had never talked about it really, but she knew. And she’s been great. Dad...didn’t know, but what he doesn’t know could fill a whole library. We haven’t really talked about it, also not a shock.” “I’m sorry,” Timo’s mouth twisted, “I guess it’s good he keeps his opinions to himself, since he took off.” “Exactly,” Wyatt smiled. “Well, for what it’s worth, I shut my parents down pretty quickly when it came up.” “You did?” Wyatt turned to Timo. “Of course I did,” he grinned, not taking his eyes off the road, “they were starting some nonsense about how a lack of the gospel will send people down the wrong path and that being gay isn’t who you really are, it’s just Satan’s influence,” Timo shook his head, “anyway, I have a strict policy against Wyatt slander in my house.” “Well, thank you,” Wyatt fiddled with the cassette adapter in his hands, “I’m sorry they’re saying stuff like that in front of you. It can’t help your anxiety about talking to them about church stuff, school stuff.” “I said that too,” Timo nodded, “I asked them if they would say that stuff if Nikki or I came out to them as gay or bi or trans…or anything else that didn’t fit the narrative.” “What did they say?” Bishop 22 “Not much,” he huffed, “Other than that they ‘raised us right’...which…again, gross.” “Yikes,” Wyatt looked down at his hands. “But yeah, in order for me to come out to them I’d have to figure myself out first, which feels impossible right now. By the time I do, I’ll probably be living elsewhere anyway.” Wyatt only nodded, unsure how to proceed. He’d never heard Timo even hint at his own sexuality. He didn’t date, unless it was a group thing like prom, or a big party. Of course Wyatt knew, and had for a decade, what he wanted Timo to want. But he also knew that was none of his business at the end of the day, unless Timo wanted him to know. He also picked up on the fact that “living elsewhere” could mean anything: Timo could move across the world as a missionary, across the country as a college student, or across town until he figured out what he wanted to do. If nothing else, Wyatt was glad he wasn’t the only one who had no idea what he wanted to do with his life after high school. “You going to play some tunes or what?” Timo pointed to the adapter in Wyatt’s lap. Wyatt smiled and stuck the cassette into the player. The radio automatically clicked over and began playing the tape. A blue light on the end of the receiver blinked at them. Wyatt held his phone up to his face to unlock it and swiped to the Bluetooth menu. “What’s your poison?” Timo’s face turned up in thought, “hmmm...” Bishop 23 “Oh here we go,” Wyatt smiled, seeing a beige cover with two black and white figures on it. He pressed play and heard the opening chords to Fleetwood Mac’s “Second Hand News” start up. The vinyl copy of Rumors hardly left the record player in the dining room since Wyatt could remember. Timo always asked if he could play it when he came over. His mom never let him listen to Fleetwood because “they did drugs and slept with everyone in town.” “Isn’t this the first gift your dad gave your mom? This album?” Timo asked. Wyatt smiled, “How the hell do you remember that?” Wyatt had forgotten himself. Timo shrugged, “Cuz it’s cute. I mean, beside the fact that your dad pulled the ultimate Fleetwood on your mom and moved as far away as humanly possible.” Wyatt genuinely laughed. The sound felt unfamiliar, “True. He took the lying and cheating to the next level. A true fan.” Timo smiled. His bright white teeth shone through the lavender light of dusk. The sun had fallen behind the lake, but the sky was still fading. Timo flipped the lights on, and Wyatt leaned his head against the cold window just as “Dreams” started up. A shining red car speeding around two-lane curves. Blonde and pink hair whipping in the wind. Dark eyeshadow. Darker lipstick…almost black. A choker with a swinging silver cross. Angry music blasting out of a convertible into the night. Sagebrush whizzing by in the wind…a deer…golden eyes ignited by Bishop 24 headlights…a screech and a scream…gravel on the tires, then brush and a cloud of dust…then the ground falling away…stomach lurching at the drop…silence, spinning, a splash…pinned by the seat…fading…flailing…nothing. “Wyatt,” a soft, warm hand covered the left side of Wyatt’s face, “I’m here, you’re okay. We’re good, shit, Wy, I’m so sorry. Come back…” Wyatt’s eyes flew open, and he realized he was practically hyperventilating. His heart flew in circles like he’d been holding his breath and sprinting at the same time. His eyes couldn’t focus, and a dull throbbing pain radiated from the spot where his neck met his skull. Another episode. He sat up and tried to speak, “Timo, I—” “You’re okay,” Timo was standing on the side of the road, leaning into the car with the passenger door open, “I’m so sorry, I was about to pee my pants and you were asleep, so I pulled over. I came back and you were…” “I’m sorry,” Wyatt squeezed Timo’s hand after it fell to his neck instead of his face. “No, don’t be,” Timo shook his head, “Do you need to get some air? Maybe walk around for a second?” “Air is good,” Wyatt tilted his head back and forth, trying to crack his neck. The pressure at the top of his spine still throbbed. Bishop 25 He stood and Timo held onto him for the first few steps. They were parked on the shoulder of highway 6. Somewhere between Nephi and Trinity. “God, how long was I out?” Wyatt asked. “An hour, maybe? There was nobody on the road from Sandy to Provo, it was nuts.” “Sorry, you could have woke me up.” “No, you probably need the sleep, I know it’s been a shitty few days.” “I know, but still. I didn’t mean to force you on a road trip, only to fall asleep on you.” “You didn’t force me into anything,” Timo shook his head, sliding his hands into the pockets of his jacket, “I wanted to come.” The keys were still in the ignition and the radio was playing Janelle Monae now. Timo must have changed it. Wyatt imagined himself sleeping while Timo drove, jamming out to Dirty Computer. Then he imagined himself flailing and drooling through his episodes. “Wait,” Wyatt thought suddenly, “what do I do? You’ve seen this happen like three times now. When it’s happening…do I talk? Move?” Timo nodded, “You breathe really heavily. It seems like you’re having a nightmare, except your eyes…” Bishop 26 “What?” Wyatt’s stomach dropped. “They move. Fast. So fast it makes my head hurt. Honestly, it seems like you’re in pain. You just kind of…writhe.” “That’s weird as shit,” Wyatt said, embarrassed, “I don’t drool or anything? Snore? Fart?” Timo laughed, “No, I mean no more than usual.” “Shut up,” Wyatt slapped his side and Timo flinched, laughing, his smile like a beacon. The sun was all the way down and there were already about three times as many stars this far south and east from civilization. Wyatt’s gaze fell to the guard rail and the shoulder in front of him. A sagebrush covered hill gave way to a substantial cliff as the road curved away to the left. The truck’s headlights illuminated swirling cones of dust and mayflies, ending on the reflective strips marking the curve, bright gold just like the doe’s eyes in his vision. Thirty or forty feet below him, the Sevier River was a trickle compared to what it had been when the red car fell into it. “Wy,” Timo breathed, realizing Wyatt was staring, transfixed on one spot, “Did you see something? Was it Nikki? Layla?” “No,” Wyatt shook his head, “I mean, yes, I saw something. But it wasn’t them.” Wyatt remembered the dark eyeshadow and the song on the radio. It was “Violet” by Hole. A song he’d heard a million times because Alice was obsessed with Courtney Love. Bishop 27 He’d also seen pictures of his mom in high school, with very similar makeup, even the choker. Did this vision happen years ago, when that song was new? “What was it?” Timo shivered slightly, his breath fogging the space between them. Wyatt recounted the vision, looking out over the edge. His foot collided with a small rock that tumbled over the edge and into the shallow water. Someone must have retrieved the car. Years of drought had reduced the river to a trickle that couldn’t hide a bicycle, let alone a two-door convertible. “Wait, so you can hear? In the visions?” Timo asked as they walked back to the truck. “Yeah. Kind of. I mean, it’s muffled. Everything kind of fluctuates. Like cell service, or the radio. It comes in and out.” “Wild,” he said, “but this was not something that was happening now. Like with Layla. Can you also see things that happened a long time ago?” “I don’t know,” Wyatt shook his head, “I mean there’s not a shiny red car down there. With Layla, I could feel her. The girl in the car, whoever she was, I could see through her eyes, but she wasn’t there. It was more like an echo.” Timo nodded as they both pulled the heavy truck doors shut. “Here,” Timo handed him a large plastic Wendy’s cup. “Did you stop?” Wyatt laughed. Bishop 28 “Yep! You didn’t move a muscle,” Timo’s huge smile lit up the night, “I got you some nuggs too.” “Stop,” Wyatt grinned, “You’re too good to me.” Timo smiled and handed over the white bag with grease blooming at the bottom. “You already eat?” Wyatt said, assessing the ten-piece nuggets and large fry in the bag. Timo nodded, then let out a comically loud hiccup as the car started. “Yep!” he laughed, “Scarfed it.” Wyatt ripped open a sauce packet and set it on the dash. Timo adjusted the rear view, checking for cars coming. Wyatt looked in his own mirror and saw something standing a few yards back on the shoulder of the road. “Hey,” Wyatt put his hand on Timo’s arm, “Back up a little…” “What?” Timo looked back, “What is it?” “I’m not sure,” Wyatt said, “there’s a sign or something, I just want to see it in the light.” Timo pulled the big silver lever down and twisted to the right to put his hand behind Wyatt’s headrest, backing up slowly to stay on the gravel shoulder and not hit the rocky hillside beyond it. A plank of wood as big as a railroad tie, painted white, crossed Wyatt’s vision. His breath caught and a prickle itched at the back of his neck as Bishop 29 he took in what was in front of them. The warm lights of the old truck washed over a big white cross someone installed in the shoulder. It had a two-foot concrete base and a big red heart at the center. Fresh flowers and toys sat around the base of the structure. The sign looked like it had been repainted several times over the years. Someone came out here regularly to keep it nice. The red heart was painted with neat white lettering that read “Heather Maureen Tracy. 1976-1994. Please Drive With Care.”